Balcony on the Moon Read online

  I can see as I speak that Father loves Mother and that he admires her, too, but he feels that the occupation and the loss of our land have taken a big piece of himself. His illness takes another piece. That he cannot do what Mother is doing is making him feel not as strong or as fortunate as she is, so he is unable to see a balance in the marriage.

  Father says that he will pray a hundred rakaas, going on his knees before Allah, asking Him to tip his heart toward the right decision. While Father makes up his mind, I, too, must continue to search for answers.

  I want to ask someone older than me, someone who also knows my father and cares about him. Father’s friends are all men and will not speak with me because I am a girl. Mother’s friends would side with her. My teachers do not know my father.

  The only solution I can think of is to take a trip to East Jerusalem to see the psychiatrist who gives Father his anti-sleeping pills. Father has been seeing him for many years. I will ask him not to mention my visit to Father. But when I tell Mother where I am going, she says she wants to come with me. Now my world fills with hope.

  * * *

  The doctor greets us and ushers us into his office. “No cure for narcolepsy yet,” he says as he raises his eyebrows to show empathy and an apology. “But you can have a new bottle of anti-sleeping pills for him,” he adds, thinking that we are here to get medicine for Father.

  “We are here for another reason,” Mother begins. “Our family is having a hard time.”

  He gives her his full attention.

  Mother opens her mouth, but she is unable to utter a sound. The doctor is quiet.

  Then she looks at me and says, “Speak for me!”

  Surprised, the doctor inquires, “Does Ibtisam know what you want to say?”

  “She knows the problem.”

  The doctor turns to me. “Tell me about your parents.”

  A million words rush to mind. I have no idea where to begin. “Anything?” I ask.

  He nods.

  I speak for a long time, and he takes notes as if I am describing an illness. Mother cries as though every word I say scrapes against an open wound. When I am done, the doctor turns to Mother and congratulates her on her courage.

  He explains that we live in a time where there are prolonged hardships that lead many people to give in to despair and even to destroy their dreams. “To have a goal like you do and fight for it inspires me,” he says. “But you must give your husband some of your love, in addition to your anger and disappointment. He is a brave man, and fights every moment of his day. I admire him, too. When he comes to see me for the anti-sleeping pills, he tells me how eager he is to make you happy whenever he can. Sometimes he is lost and doesn’t know what to do.”

  I want to embrace the doctor before we leave.

  Outside the clinic, Mother quietly tells me, “When you see your father, tell him to come home.”

  The minute we get back to Ramallah, I fly to tell Father. “Mother said, indirectly, that she loves you.”

  Father agrees to come back home. He and I lock our arms and walk, and with every step I wish we could dance on the street and that he could sing his joy in public.

  * * *

  The problem between my parents is finally over, especially because my brother Muhammad, even though it is the middle of his school year, offers to attend al-Urduneyyah, too. That way Mother will not be there by herself.

  Muhammad easily thinks of others, maybe even more than he thinks of himself. If Mother demands that I eat something, he gently reminds her: “Maybe Ibtisam does not like this food. So to eat it can build her body but will hurt her soul.” When my younger brothers fight like bear cubs, he separates them and reminds them that they need to help one another, not fight with one another.

  Father agrees to Muhammad’s offer. But he also asks Mother to promise not to look men in the eyes when speaking with them. “That is how problems happen: a look, a smile, a meeting, and then a falling…” he warns. She promises.

  Because Muhammad is tall and big, and Mother appears young and does not want her classmates to know that he is one of her seven children, she tells them that Muhammad is her stepson. When I visit her school, she introduces me as her stepdaughter. I go along with it. When I speak with anyone from her school I refer to her as my stepmother. She is pleased. She exchanges her wedding ring for another, with a new, fashionable style. By the end of her first year at al-Urduneyyah, she no longer wears it to school.

  When she is seen walking with Father, she says he is her father, not her husband. Those who don’t know them believe this because of my parents’ age difference. Surprisingly, Father does not mind Mother saying this. He tells me that he understands that she is trying to adjust to the world as a schoolgirl. “But if someone who thinks that I am her father comes to me asking for her hand in marriage, don’t blame me if I make them regret every word,” he says.

  “I promise that I will not blame you,” I reply, laughing.

  Mother passes her tenth-grade exams. These results determine whether she will be placed in the adaby, literary, or elmy, scientific, stream. The topics of study and future possibilities of work are widely different in these two areas. Mother is placed in the literary stream. My own results qualify me for science.

  Mother is annoyed with her results because now she and I will not have the same curriculum. We will share only Arabic, English, and religion, the core subjects required of all students. And not to qualify for the elmy is viewed negatively by everyone in the West Bank. The science students feel proud and are celebrated in a way that the literary students never are. Most scholarships to go to college and pursue higher education are awarded to science students. When someone says adaby the tone of voice is always humble, as though saying it is a failure of some sort, or that the person was not clever enough to be in science. I do not know why this is, especially because Palestinians never stop quoting poetry and literary passages with great admiration.

  But Mother and I agree that this difference is meaningless. “Do you think al-Mutanabbī, the great Arab poet, and Plato, the Greek philosopher, and Shakespeare, the great English dramatist and poet, were failures because they did not do science?” I ask her.

  She adds that if science is so much better than literature, then why did Allah send holy texts with nothing but stories to people, rather than sending scientific equations and geometrical shapes.

  * * *

  As Mother has been progressing and changing at al-Urduneyyah, Basel has been progressing and changing in college, but not in the expected academic direction. He now talks about girls all the time and brings American tourist women to visit us. They sit and we make tea for them. “American women do not care about how new or old our furniture looks,” he says. “They do not care about appearances.”

  “But they care about your appearance,” Muhammad teases.

  I can see that Muhammad is especially anxious about losing Basel to a world Muhammad knows nothing about. Basel and Muhammad have been close all their lives, going to the same schools, having many friends in common, having the same summer jobs, playing sports on the same teams, and fighting against the same bullies.

  But now Basel’s going to college, and his interest in women, flashy clothes, and dance moves separates them and they grow apart. These are not things that Muhammad cares about. He is more like Father, quiet, seeking a secure world that only Allah can provide. Like Father, Muhammad prefers older social traditions to change.

  Basel rents a post office box in Birzeit to correspond with the American women he meets. He wants to stay in touch after they go back to the States, and he does not want the letters to come to our home address. If they did, Mother would open them, ask me to translate them, and then tease Basel about the content of the letters. Basel shows me some of the adoring letters women send to him, how they compliment him and long to see him again.

  Basel also goes with his college friends to other cities we have only heard of, and he spends nights out. When he is
home, he plays loud Western music at the highest volume. And like many other college students, he writes letters to English-language radio programs, requesting that they play his favorite songs. He has songs by Demis Roussos, Donna Summer, Pink Floyd, Boy George, and the Eagles dedicated to his friends, and sometimes to me. I begin to write to those radio programs, too, wanting to hear my name mentioned.

  As Mother and I begin the eleventh grade, Basel becomes obsessed with cars and bodybuilding. He does not own a car but has learned to drive friends’ vehicles. Our walls are filled with magazine pictures of bodybuilders from around the world. And when lifting weights, he gazes at a big poster of Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  Muhammad begins to train in bodybuilding, too, and tells me that he has quit smoking. He works hard and his muscles become well-defined like Basel’s. But I know that Muhammad remains shy. If Muhammad had a choice to be on stage with a thousand people cheering at his feet or in a small garden with one bird singing, he would choose the garden and he would be patiently imitating the bird to keep it company.

  Because stepping outside the house means someone, a potential admirer, will see him, every morning Basel pays great attention to his hair, buying special Head & Shoulders shampoo and conditioner. Anyone who touches his hair products must be ready for a fight with our resident Arnold. After washing his hair, he pats it dry as though every hair is an eyelash. While he combs his hair and studies his face in the only mirror in the house, I braid my hair without a mirror.

  After Basel sees the movie Saturday Night Fever, he begins to act like John Travolta, spending every minute in the house practicing dance moves with a shirt unbuttoned down to his navel, a gold necklace lost in his chest hair, bell-bottom pants, and long bangs that he tosses right and left to cover his eyes. He dances harder than Mother studies.

  Then one day in the early spring, Basel announces he is going to move to America. Someone he met during a part-time job he had as a money changer will sponsor his travel and give him work in Chicago. He will go to a country that is open and filled with freedom.

  With all the preparation for his leaving, our house fills with a strange sadness, especially because we have no idea what America is like, and any Palestinian who leaves the borders is not guaranteed reentry.

  People visit us to say goodbye to him on the last day, all remembering sons they have lost to the most painful word in the Arabic language, ghurbah: leaving home and going to live far away in a world that is unfamiliar. One becomes a ghareeb, a stranger.

  Grandma, as she looks at Basel, remembers Grandpa, who decided that ghurbah anywhere is easier than living under occupation. He offered to take her with him, but she said she couldn’t leave her homeland no matter who ruled over it. They separated, and Grandpa settled in Belgium.

  Now Basel stands at the door with a small suitcase, wearing shiny shoes, a smile in his eyes. He is ready to go. Because I have many pen pals, he hands me the key to his post office box in Birzeit as a gift. I will no longer need to receive my correspondence at home, where Mother insists I tell her what is written in the letters.

  Father weeps. “Let me look at you and fill my eyes with you before you leave,” he says. He holds Basel’s face between his hands, kisses him on the cheeks, and embraces him in a way meant to last him for years. He places his head against Basel’s chest and laments: “There is no future for us on our land. We have to go away to make anything of ourselves. Allah maa-ak, may Allah be with you,” Father says as Basel walks out the door of our house for the last time. Father’s tears pour for days.

  Shortly after we learn that Basel arrived safely in America, Muhammad decides to leave school. He says he is taking time off to work and become more independent.

  “Don’t do that!” I plead with him. “Finish school first. You only have a few months left. Consider it a prison sentence and finish. Don’t stop just before the end. What is independence without education?”

  “I’m not prepared to sit for any exams,” he says, looking discouraged and tired.

  “Please finish high school first. Without finishing, all the work you’ve already done will be lost.”

  Muhammad does not change his mind: he leaves school. And he says nothing about Mother continuing to go without him to al-Urduneyyah. He also stops his bodybuilding. Without Basel, Muhammad appears lost. He goes back to smoking.

  I ask him what work he will do, and he says he can work on a construction site and that will be some sort of bodybuilding exercise. He tells me he also wants to get his driver’s license.

  * * *

  Without Muhammad going to school with her, Mother announces that it is necessary for us to move again—this time to a place closer to her school so that she can walk a shorter distance. More important, because she and I no longer study the same subjects, she wants to have a guest room, for inviting her girlfriends Abla and Athena to come to our place and do homework together. She wants to live in the center of Ramallah.

  To meet the extra expenses of the move, Mother takes part-time work as a seamstress working for Ramallah’s mayor’s sister. She will help her with special projects: mainly making dresses for brides from wealthy families.

  The minute we learn that an apartment has become available in the Salah Building on Main Street, the first commercial housing project in Ramallah, my father signs the lease. How wonderful it will be to live in the center of the city.

  PART IV

  Main Street

  1980–1981

  People

  We move at the beginning of June, just after school ends. The first morning in the new apartment, I am still in bed, even though it is eight-thirty, when our doorbell rings many times, nonstop. I jump up to answer it. Randa, our next-door neighbor, is standing there looking afraid and shaking her hands in the gesture Palestinians use to express that something terrible has happened.

  “Did you hear? Turn on your radio,” she says.

  We do, and learn that only ten minutes away from where we live, Ramallah’s mayor, Karim Khalaf, is fighting for his life. This morning, when he started his car, a bomb that had been planted in the engine exploded. Another bomb went off when he took his foot off the brakes. Then a third exploded seconds after one of the mayor’s neighbors pulled him out of the car.

  I stand on the balcony of our new apartment for the first time and look down at Main Street below us. Army jeeps are speeding past to other parts of the city. Shopkeepers are coming to work holding their portable radios to their ears. A military helicopter hovers above.

  Then we hear that twenty-three miles away, in the city of Nablus, north of Ramallah, there was another car bombing that damaged both of its mayor’s legs.

  Who and what next? The question is on everyone’s mind. Shortly after, we learn that the mayor of al-Bireh is the third target. But having heard about the two injured mayors, al-Bireh’s mayor sought help before entering his car. An Israeli explosives expert rushed to neutralize any bombs in the mayor’s vehicle. But he did not consider the possibility of danger outside the car. As he opened the mayor’s garage door, a bomb went off and caused the explosives expert to lose his eyesight.

  The West Bank swells with pain. The Israeli government’s recent decision to allow armed Israeli settlers to take Palestinian property and build two large settlements in the city of al-Khaleel, Hebron, amid the all-Palestinian population, had led to today’s events. A month ago, angry Palestinians in Hebron killed six Jewish settlers. The Israeli army imposed a curfew on the Palestinian residents of the city for sixteen days. During the curfew, Israeli settlers roamed the streets, vandalizing cars and breaking windows. The Palestinian mayors of Hebron and the neighboring town of Halhoul, in addition to Hebron’s Islamic religious judge, were arrested and their heads were covered with cloth sacks so they could not see where they were being taken. They were left at the Lebanese border and ordered not to return.

  An armed Jewish extremist group called Gush Emunim is connected to this morning’s explosion
s.

  Over the next few days, from my perch on the balcony, I watch the protests. Then, to prevent any new confrontations, Israeli soldiers impose a curfew on Ramallah. But that does not help and only adds to the volatile feelings.

  In this new apartment with the balcony over Main Street, a curfew is different from before. Instead of the army watching us from towers and rooftops, we are now the ones doing the watching from above. From the balcony we can observe every move of the soldiers on the street, especially those in open army jeeps who chase boys staying out in spite of the curfew.

  When soldiers see us looking, a few of them point their guns at us. Snipers take the stairs all the way to the tops of high buildings, including ours, to monitor the streets below. We hear their footsteps. They enter some homes randomly to show that they are in charge, and special units search homes where they suspect protesters are hiding. They always work in groups because they are afraid families will make a surprise attack on them. The curfew lasts five days, but the protests last for weeks.

  * * *

  In the middle of the summer, Ramallah begins to return to normal in spite of the snipers who seem to live on top of the taller buildings. We try to ignore them and go on with our lives.

  Instead of working in a factory this summer, I teach Arabic to children of foreign families who have come to Ramallah to do missionary work, help the UN agencies, or teach in private schools. I also tutor high school students who have gotten incompletes in some of their classes and will only advance to the next grade level if they pass the course by the end of the summer. Tutoring helps me earn some money and distracts me from my worries and fears.

  Encouraged by my working, Mona gets a part-time job selling eyeglass frames. Some days she comes home wearing green or blue contact lenses and we hardly recognize her. She looks like a cover girl from a European fashion magazine.